Will 2018 be a watershed moment in political feminism?

Women with bright pink hats and signs gather early and are set to make their voices heard on the first full day of Donald Trump's presidency, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2017 in Washington. ( AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Very few people would go to the World Economic Forum in Davos to meet women — even powerful women.

According to the Forum’s own website, women represent only about one in five of the 3,000-plus participants in this annual movers-and-shakers summit. Canada’s own delegation doesn’t boast much better stats: of the roughly 60 Canadians who are in Davos this week, only about a quarter are women.

Perhaps that’s why most of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s one-on-one sessions at Davos this week are with men. Trudeau’s itinerary for Davos, in fact, reads like a “meet-the-one-per-cent” adventure for business-school keeners.

So is this kind of an awkward place to be preaching feminism, as Trudeau did on Tuesday? Or is it, as the prime minister and his team seem to think, exactly the place where cages need to be rattled?

“I’d like to focus on a fundamental shift that every leader in this room can act on immediately,” Trudeau said in his big address to Davos today. “I’m talking about hiring, promoting and retaining more women … Not just because it’s the right thing to do, or the nice thing to do, but because it’s the smart thing to do.”

There’s a good reason why Trudeau chose Davos to double down on his whole feminist messaging thing this year. And yes, it kind of does come down to, “Because it’s 2018.”

Somehow, over the past 12 months, the world seems to have decided that feminism is the reply to Donald Trump and anti-elite populism. It’s a Venus and Mars collision in the political culture:

Trump gets sworn into the White House on Jan. 20, 2017; millions of women march in streets around the world the day after.

While the White House is being run by a man with some seriously sexist history, Hollywood goes all “Me Too” and cracks down on sexual harassers and predators.

And when Trump’s vague ‘America First’ ideology threatens Canada-U.S. relations, Trudeau’s government replies with a plan for both leaders to promote women entrepreneurs. (The first report on the Trump-Trudeau women entrepreneurs’ panel was released over the past few days.)

You get the idea. If Trump is the problem, feminism is the answer. You might even say that feminism is the new black. Or, if you watched the Golden Globe ceremonies earlier this month, you could say that black (as in dress colours) is the new feminism.

While all this talk is welcome — especially for women like me — it’s hard to shake the nagging concern that feminism is just a convenient synonym at the moment for anti-Trump sentiment.

Last year, you’ll remember, Trudeau skipped the whole Davos thing because leaders like him were still not really sure how to reconcile Trump’s victory — and the populist forces it represented — with the ‘elite’ nature of the World Economic Forum.

Instead, Trudeau went to Hamburg a few weeks later and delivered a speech he’d originally written for Davos: an interesting lecture, as it turned out, on why businesses had to be more mindful of the public and civic interest. “It’s time to pay a living wage. To pay your taxes. And give workers the benefits — and peace of mind — that come with stable, full-time contracts,” Trudeau said.

After that speech, I’d been waiting to see what Trudeau’s next budget would do to live up to that challenge on the government front. The answer was tax reform for small business — and we know how that turned out. Rather than rein in populist anger, as they were intended to do, the tax proposals from Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Trudeau seemed to unleash a wave of it in Canada for most of 2017.

That’s also why I was intrigued to see what Trudeau was going to say this year, now that he’s decided to return to Davos. In many ways, the World Economic Forum made it easy for the PM to return, putting all women in the co-chairs’ seats (though not as many in the participants’ seats).

And sure enough, Trudeau devoted much of his speech to feminism, including promises to move forward with pay-equity legislation this year and some more general talk about removing barriers faced by women in Canadian workplaces.

While all this talk is welcome — especially for women like me — it’s hard to shake the nagging concern that feminism is just a convenient synonym at the moment for anti-Trump sentiment.

It circles around the other, larger f-word — fairness, or more precisely, the lack of it — that is fuelling the discontent that Trudeau talked about in his Davos speech. Making the world fairer for women is only part of the reply to Trump-style populism.

“Do we want to help create a world grounded in the notion of fairness?” Trudeau asked in his Davos speech today. Presumably, the answer to that question was ‘yes’.

How will they know when the world is more fair? Well, maybe when more than one in five of the participants at this annual gathering are women.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Susan Delacourt is one of Canada's best-known political journalists. Over her long career she has worked at some of the top newsrooms in the country, from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail to the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. She is a frequent political panelist on CBC Radio and CTV. Author of four books, her latest — Shopping For Votes — was a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2014. She teaches classes in journalism and political communication at Carleton University.